Success Tale of
Dan Komarony is one of those lucky people who man-aged
PACKAGING
What started as a fun project in a machine shop has turned into a thriving
business with worldwide sales for the inventors of the MicroBottler
By Mark Halsall
to turn his love of beer into a successful business.
Think it’s a craft brewery? Guess again.
It all started about six years ago when some friends of
Komarony decided to start their own craft brewery. They were
looking for a piece of bottling equipment they could use that
wouldn’t cost them an arm and a leg. They turned to Komarony,
a long-time machinist with his own shop in town, DK Machine,
for help.
“I looked into the bottling world and couldn’t find anything
unless you spent US$80,000 to $100,000, so we decided we
should try to see if this was something that we could make our-selves,”
said Komarony, who lives in Fort Edward, a small com-munity
in upstate New York.
Komarony and his team at DK Machine came up with
an innovative bottling device that came to be known as
the MicroBottler.
“Because I own a machine shop, we had the engineering
and the manufacturing capabilities here, and we made a lot of
our own parts. That’s how we could develop the machine,” said
Komarony, whose team at DK Machine have 35 years of preci-sion
manufacturing experience. “The initial one was just for fun
… something we played around with in our spare time.”
The group spent three years perfecting the device, and a
separate business, DK Advanced Technologies, was eventually
set up to market the MicroBottler.
“We’d run it at least once a week, filling bottles and come
back with problems we had encountered, then we would brain-storm
solutions and make the necessary modifications,” said
Komarony. “In the meantime, I knew a lot people who wanted a
machine like this, but couldn’t find one, so we decided to start
DK Advanced Technologies.
“We made a couple more prototype machines, which we got
into local breweries and started putting the MicroBottler to
the real-world test. From there, it spun off to where we sell them
all over the world now.”
Photos courtesy of DK Advanced Technologies
DK Advance Technologies’ support team
A DKanner awaiting final inspection prior to shipping
FALL 2020 § POURED CANADA § 41